"Remove connection"... what a friendly way to say I hate you.
You’ve heard it before (maybe you’ve even said it yourself): “I just purged a bunch of people from my Facebook account.” Here’s how I translate that irritating statement in my brain: “I’m a douchebag who likes to pretend that the ‘throngs and throngs’ of people–people who I either added myself on Facebook or accepted their friendship request at one point–were just bogging me down so much and I had to cut them out of my life. Because I’m a douchebag and I need to complain that I’m just too popular. And I hate sunshine and dolphins and Project Runway marathons on Bravo.”
So, douchebags of the world, here’s my response to you:
- On behalf of those people that you deleted, thanks. We enjoyed being your friend just as much as you enjoyed being our friend (read: not that much). The only difference is that we didn’t have the buckets of time that you clearly have to one-by-one systematically delete individual people from your account. Which brings me to my next point…
- Clearly, you have waaaay too much time on your hands. Now I’m not going to say that deleting Facebook friends is a difficult task; it’s not. But deleting hundreds of friends (which is usually the number people toss around as they brag about this accomplishment) is.Here’s some math: It’s a two-click action to sever a Facebook friendship (one to remove, one to confirm). Let’s estimate that it takes two seconds to complete this process (I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt with a fast connection), and about 8 seconds on average to make the decision to sever a Facebook friendship (“But I can decide much quicker than that if I don’t want to be friends with someone” you say. Yes, but let’s be sure to factor in all the wandering that you will inevitably do when a scantily-clad profile picture draws you in; really, I’m being generous with this as well). That’s 10 seconds for the whole process, or roughly 6 friendships a minute. If you were to delete 100 friends at this rate, that would take you a little over 16 minutes. So to purge 300 friends (the most common number I hear) would take around 45 minutes. Good lord, what a miserable use of your time.
Seriously, it’s a digital connection. It’s of no cost to you to maintain this electronic relationship. What has our society come to where someone will go out of their way to electronically break off all communication with you, just because they felt like they had “too many friends”?
Before you come back with a douchebag retort that “justifies” your action, let me just say that I’ve heard all of them and they’re all nonsensical. Here are two, followed by my retort:
“But their status updates were annoying.”
Simple solution: hide them from your news feed.
When you see a chronic annoying poster, simply click the “X” to the right and hit “Hide [name]“–easy, right?
Also, your Facebook feed learns what you like reading based on what you’ve clicked in the past. So really, it’s your own fault that your feed is annoying (disclaimer: this is an example of an unverified statement of fact which sounds correct, so just take me on my word). I can personally state that there’s one person in particular whose updates always get shoveled into my feed. Annoying? Yes. But do I click on every single one of them? Absolutely.
“I don’t want them to see my profile anymore”
Simple solution: Create special categories for groups of people and only give them limited access to your profile.
Seeing how your profile looks to other people: just another cool privacy setting brought to you by Facebook.
As much as people bitch and complain about Facebook’s privacy settings, they’re actually pretty straightforward; while they’ve built a lot of interesting features, most people are just too lazy to take advantage of them. One of those features is the ability to setup special groups; here are some examples: “Family”, “Coworkers”, “People I’ve Slept With”, “Aboriginals”, “People I’ve never met before but their profile picture was hot so I friended them”. Another cool feature is the ability to see how other people view your profile, based on what privileges you’ve given them.
Also, what is on your profile that you don’t want them to see? Slutty Halloween costumes? A picture where both of your eyes aren’t lining up correctly because you’re wasted? Really, this begs another question: if you don’t want Aunt Mildred seeing a picture of you doing body shots on a beach in Cancun, should those pictures be up on the internet at all? And maybe you shouldn’t have been so slutty in the first place (there, I said it).
Do you know what those pictures say to me: wow, you graduated from college. So did I. So did your parents. We all have pictures like that somewhere (our parents’ pictures are just in boxes stored in a basement in Boca Raton). And I guarantee you that you only know of about half of them on Facebook. When you run for Congress, they will be found, whether or not you delete me from Facebook (in fact, I think you’re only incentivizing me more if you delete me).
Pretty soon, we’ll get to a point in our society where those photos won’t mean anything anymore. Do you know why? Because in 20 years, you and I will be writing stories for the Washington Post, we’ll be sitting on the other side of the interview table, we’ll have our own kids, and we won’t care about those useless photos anymore because I’m sure we will have had worse. So I’m votingwithmyfeet.com by not caring.
If you’re planning on deleting me on Facebook, do me a favor: let me know, so I can delete you first.
About five or six years ago, delis and sandwich shops started to make their credit card machines print out a space for you to leave a tip. At first I thought this was just an anomaly or a poorly programmed machine. But then it began to crop up at more and more places, and before you knew it, nearly every sandwich, pizza and coffee place now includes a place for tip.
